I'm halfway through Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell. It's been sitting by bed for ages. I don't read much anymore.
I was very ill yesterday. Two days ago I crashed. I woke up tired, but pushed myself to do a story for C-Ville Weekly, two newsletters, and an appearance on WINA. I had a beer, and immediately got chills. Serious chills.
I knew the signs of an oncoming fever, so I went to bed at 6:30 p.m. and my brain immediately went into the fever dream stage, with racing thoughts that are elusive and persistent and pervasive and you cannot actually rest.
At some point in that long period of staying under many blankets with no interest in a screen, I turned to the novel.
I believe my life is better in the times when I am reading a novel that captivates me.
The first one I probably read independently was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I was ten, maybe? Maybe younger? I had been obsessed with the radio series, an obsession that I indulged last night when desperately searching for something to read when I needed to take a break from Utopia Avenue last night.
On Tuesday I slept until 9:30 a.m. though I know I was awake at some point in the night and I began to read the book that had been waiting for me by my bedside. I read the first page when I was at the library about a month or so ago.
I won't tell you much about it, except to say that I wanted to find a really compelling novel around that time and remembered vaguely that David Mitchell was a writer whose works I remembered. It's been several years since I've read one of his novels.
This is not the same David Mitchell from Peep Show and currently of the program Ludwig. And not the same person I occasionally quote locally in the work I do.
I'm very glad to do the work I do. A downside I may not speak enough about is how the work pervades into my dreams. During my fever dreams, all of these random snippets of immediate need to know things were piercing at me fierce.
The works of David Mitchell are compelling to me. I barely know anything about him, and whatever I know now I will likely forget, but I've just learned through research that he considers all of his work as part of one "macronovel" but there's no further information available on that without a subscription.
The novel is about a fictional band put together by a manager in the heyday of London's time in the psychedelic 60's. I'm drawn to that period of music for more reasons than worth explaining now. For now in this narrative I'm in bed trying to fight off the sense of failure I feel when I cannot do my work.
On Tuesday, I could not do anything. So I picked up the book and was swept away, learning so many bits of wisdom along the way about the importance of music and the importance of art, and I can see the characters as they go through their part in the narrative David Mitchell wrote.
One of them is David Bowie who shows up in a scene where one of our heroes is on a staircase. This is just before he did the Laughing Gnome video which is hopefully the cover photo for this post.
In a moment of some energy Tuesday, I got up and put on Bowie's first album. Not the one with Space Oddity, but the other one that's more vaudeville than rock and roll. I love it.
I'm halfway through Utopia Avenue and I'm taking a break today. I already feel I am going to miss these characters whose fictional songs I will never for real and can't even really imagine how they might go.
That's because I know I have all of these songs in my past that are recording and waiting to be fleshed out into something else. I do that work for the same reason I do the work I do for a living.
I want to document my life and one day the world may know my sonic self. But the world is too prone to crushing and I know that through experience as well as by knowing when to pick up a good book.
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